Post by drweir on Jul 27, 2005 14:27:38 GMT -5
I was asked to explain how I did the stop motion in Peep Kong. There were a couple methods. I use a green piece of posterboard that is hung behind Kong and goes under his feet as well. Kong was clay molded over a generic G.I. Joe style action figure, so that it could bend at all the right places. Without some inner armature the clay doesn't stay put where you want it very well. I then set up my digicam to it's lowest setting, where it holds about 100 pictures before it's full. I took as many as I needed and then upped them to the computer, where I highlighted the whole lot of them and dropped them on my timeline in Adobe Premiere. I specified to Premiere to put each one on the screen for two frames, which I could always change later by speeding it up or slowing it down. I rendered the series into a small avi movie which I then opened in Adobe After Effects. I'm a novice with that program but learned enough on how to use the chromakey features to make this work. Premiere has chromakey stuff but doesn't work as well. After Effects lets you make multiple passes and key out tiny degrees of green with each pass, so as not to remove too much or too little of the picture the way premiere often does. It's very difficult even with a flat green surface to create images in one specific green shade. Peep Kong cast shadows which created darker greens. So After Effects proved to be invaluable. I removed the green in that and put it over a solid blue screen, so in essense I removed a bad greenscreen effect and replaced it with a perfect bluescreen effect. Now I could use it in Premiere without fear of keying out too much or too little.
Then I made the movie as usual in Premiere. But some shots of Kong's movement are jerkier than others. Most notable are the shots of him climbing and the shot of him falling to the ground when the gas bomb detonated. This was because the action figure did not allow for poses where the center of gravity was off, like with a leg in the air or in the middle of a fall, so I literally had to hold Kong and take a pic. Because of this I took as few as possible to create the effect since I had to manually create the bluescreen/ greenscreen effect in each fame, covering the bits of my hand, in Photoshop.
For close up's of Kong's head and for part of the T rex animation, it appears to be really good stop motion. Let me be honest. That isn't stop motion at all but is made to look like it. To do that I took actual video of me moving it around in front of the greenscreen. Then I keyed out the green as explained above. Then in Premiere I told it to speed up the clip. When you speed up clips in Premiere it does it by removing frames. Then I told it to slow it back down again, to the original speed. When you slow down clips in Premiere it does it by duplicating frames. So this caused a jerky stop motion effect which is what I wanted.
I hope you can see how much work I dumped into this project. It was a good learning experience but I can honestly say I hate making stop motion in front of greenscreens now!
Then I made the movie as usual in Premiere. But some shots of Kong's movement are jerkier than others. Most notable are the shots of him climbing and the shot of him falling to the ground when the gas bomb detonated. This was because the action figure did not allow for poses where the center of gravity was off, like with a leg in the air or in the middle of a fall, so I literally had to hold Kong and take a pic. Because of this I took as few as possible to create the effect since I had to manually create the bluescreen/ greenscreen effect in each fame, covering the bits of my hand, in Photoshop.
For close up's of Kong's head and for part of the T rex animation, it appears to be really good stop motion. Let me be honest. That isn't stop motion at all but is made to look like it. To do that I took actual video of me moving it around in front of the greenscreen. Then I keyed out the green as explained above. Then in Premiere I told it to speed up the clip. When you speed up clips in Premiere it does it by removing frames. Then I told it to slow it back down again, to the original speed. When you slow down clips in Premiere it does it by duplicating frames. So this caused a jerky stop motion effect which is what I wanted.
I hope you can see how much work I dumped into this project. It was a good learning experience but I can honestly say I hate making stop motion in front of greenscreens now!
